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Eric Swain External Sources

The Moving Pixels Podcast Spends Halloween with ‘The Music Machine’

October 27, 2015 | Filed under: External Sources, Recent Posts It’s our annual Halloween episode where we look at a horror game. This year it was the indie title The Music Machine. I don’t come right out and say it, but I do like this game. Enough that I will be trying out the rest of his catalog on Steam … (This post is lost beyond this point.) The Moving Pixels Podcast Spends Halloween with 'The Music Machine' » PopMatters "Loneliness is listing your barber as an emergency contact. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – Minisode 06 – Relationships and Forward Motion

Minisode 06 with the lovely Gita Jackson joining me. That title took some work coming up with. The second half at least. Forward Motion may have been stretching things a bit, but I could not come up with anything else. Also, this is about when my well of games to recommend is running rather dry. There are plenty of games I would love to recommend because they don’t get what I feel is their due, but they have criticism (not much and easily missed) and therefore fall outside the scope of this experiment. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Learning to Survive in ‘Fallout Shelter’

This week we talk about this year’s it iOS game, now ported to Android, Fallout Shelter. I’m generally amenable to playing any of the game’s we decide on, but damn was I bored with this one. I placed the tablet on my desk and work on my laptop while things … (This post is lost beyond this point.) Moving Pixels Podcast: Learning to Survive in the 'Fallout Shelter' » PopMatters "Hard work is happy work." | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Life Gets Stranger

Episode 3 of our look through Life is Strange. This might be one of my favorite podcast episodes I’ve been on. A good 45 minutes, a good half of the episode, is spent discussing the theoretical and philosophical nature of photography as a medium and its relation back to the … (This post is lost beyond this point.) Moving Pixels Podcast: Life Gets Stranger » PopMatters "Max Caulfield, moral avenger. Or self-righteous hypocrite?" | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Sometimes It’s Hard to Discover That ‘Life is Strange’

We continue our series on the episodic adventure game Life is Strange, with episode 2. This episode of the podcast does deserve a trigger warning for discussion of sexual assault, rape and suicide. Not necessarily connected or in that order. The discussion got a bit heated in the middle over one of the choices in the game and the implications several of us felt that they reflected in the real world. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

How Artificial Intelligence Views Humans in ‘The Fall’

In my last PopMatters post I wrote about how humans view AI, this time I reverse the position and explore how AI views us in The Fall. I had some idea about where I was going with this as I was writing it. In fact, it would have gone up two weeks earlier, but I had to rewrite a majority of it so that many of the new insights that I gleened during the process of logically thinking through each character would fit into a more nuanced and detailed thesis that had emerged. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Coming of Age When ‘Life is Strange’

And so begins another series of podcasts, episode by episode, of another episodic adventure game. This time it is Dontnod’s Life is Strange. I’ve been hoping at some point we’d get to talk about Life is Strange. Ever since I first played it back in January. Though I was a little down on it at first, the game offered a lot of material worthy of discussion. It’s a dense game with multiple lens that can be applied to it. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Searching For ‘Her Story’

This time we talked about this year’s water cooler game, Her Story. This is up a bit late as we had a number of technical difficulties. First a broken computer meant it wasn’t posted on its normal Monday date. Then an issue with SoundCloud meant the podcast couldn’t be downloaded until last night. It’s all fixed now. This is a game I knew we’d have a good discussion about, even if I didn’t have my own opinion on it straight. In fact, I’m still not sure what I think of it overall, because it is a complex work. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Attempting to Characterize Artificial Intelligence in ‘The Fall’

I’m finally back to writing and finally getting around to jotting some thoughts down on my number 2 game from last year, The Fall. These are more the beginning of thoughts regarding The Fall‘s display of consciousness and intelligence than fully formed conclusions. One of the big issues a lot of science fiction has is that when it presents alien intelligence it generally just shows off a facet of human intelligence. Star Trek is the big example. | more